Chris Jordan

I think there's a tremendous amount of unacknowledged hostility in American culture.

How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?

I think of myself as a translator. I just change the dry, unfeeling language of data into a visual language that allows for feeling.

Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses.

I'm not against shock and horror. In fact, I really belive in facing the dark realities of our time as the first step in coming out of denial. So we have to look into the darkness.

When I learned about this tragedy that's happening in Midway - you know, these birds whose stomachs are filled with handfuls of our waste - I just felt drawn there magnetically.

I'm just becoming more and more aware of this truly profound responsibility that we carry as individuals. And it's a responsibility not only to ourselves and to our families, but to the billions of people who still have to come in the future who will be dealing with our legacy.

What I aspire to is to have the viewer look directly at the subject, as if they're looking through a window at the real thing.

I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.

There is no public out there who needs to change. It's each one of us.

I want people to realize that they matter.

I know that if I were to take ugly photographs, no one would be interested in looking at them.

I find myself walking these lines. Like I might be an artist, but I also might be an activist. And I'm trying to be both in a way that honors both and doesn't stray too far into either.

All of my work is meant to evoke a whole bunch of different layers of discord between the attraction and repulsion that we feel toward our consumer habits and our consumer lives.

One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.

American culture is not about experiencing our shame, it's about denying it. It's been that way our whole history.

I hate the word 'rendering,' as it equates to 'pouring concrete' on ideas that demand continuing dialog. 'Trade secrets' imply hoarding of knowledge.

I only want to work with transparent ideas and accessible technologies that 'spotlight' the individual's role in society through creativity. I try to live an open-source life.

There's an axiom I live by: 'There is no art without politics.' You either choose to engage it, or you choose political apathy. This ties in with ideas around real-time performance and feedback.

Set your compass to beauty, humor, and grief; stay the course no matter what, and I'll support you with everything I've got.

My ideas tend to arise out of nowhere when I'm not intentionally trying to think of something.

My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously on a collective level. And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, every day.

We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger, and our grief about what's going on in our culture right now, what's going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world. They've gone missing; these feelings have gone missing.

Activating is about changing people's perceptions of overlooked or invisible spaces. A building can become an archetype, invisible, like for a New Yorker, for example, the Statue of Liberty. You look at it, and it disappears into the thousands of times you've already seen it.

If you sit down among hundreds of thousands of albatrosses in a field, pretty soon you'll be completely surrounded by them, as they come walking up toward us and nibble on our shoelaces and just look right at us out of curiosity.